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This Journal Makes Me Smarter

Hard work is meaningful, as serious people know, and like a good trek or a hard run, I emerged from Five Points Vol 13, Number 1 exhilarated. A little sweaty, frustrated at points, but smarter, tougher, and damn happy.

The journal, the last of three for 2009, features work from twenty-six contributors, thirteen of whom are poets, six fiction writers, three essayists, one interview, and a portfolio of work and an accompanying essay by photographer Lili Almog, whose austere image of a nun, arms outstretched and what appear to be Birkenstocks on her feet, is the glossy cover image.

The majority of the authors in this issue are critically acclaimed, and rightfully so. Mark Jarman opens the issue with four short poems that are connected by theme; ruminations on endings and beginnings, and the sentience of animals and humans. In "Goleta Winter Solstice," he establishes this with,

the sea lion families hug their buoys like presents/
They don't look like they're going.

Poet Susan Wood's "A Short History of Women in the Nineteenth Century" rings with voices of the indignant dead, women's skulls in the Mutter Museum (the medical and anatomical museum in Philadelphia) telling their stories to the narrator. Dead, they are free to tell their side of their story; a "whore" who worked because she "liked to eat," a maid dead in childbirth, her "master's" child gone with her, and the last voice that of a murdered woman named Ellen Jones, calling out

all of them exclaiming over my poor, hurt head, these people/
I swear, they just don't know any thing yet.

This is emotionally hard work. Wood's structure and clarity of voice and image are riveting. This is a poem impossible to turn away from.

Edwin Hirsch, the poetry consultant to, Five Points provokes literary wordplay in "Dark Tour," thirty tercets charting a lovers' spat, breakup, and make-up, set within syllabic snapshots of a world tour. Complicated? You bet. Fascinating? Absolutely. Hirsch teases his characters, himself, and his readers with jigsaw puzzles like;

Warsaw
Then we sawed away/
at the iron pact we made
/to stay together.

Poet Philip Levine, whom I like to imagine as having worn shirt sleeves and fingernails ragged from manual labor, contributes a biographical essay, " A History of Befuddlement." There's a deep delight in reading a great poet discuss his own trial and error in coming to poetry, especially Levine's signature direct, non-romantic style. "Have I bored you?" he inquires of his readers at the essay's end, a challenge that continues with, "I hope not. Have I befuddled you? I certainly hope so." Levine knows it takes brain power to do the heavy thinking that accompanies deep reading.

Other poets in this issue include Linda Pastan, Coleman Barks, and Edip Cansever, a Turkish poet (1928-1986) translated here by Richard Tillinghast and Julia Clare Tillinghast-Akalin, who the contributor's notes indicate are a father-daughter team. Poets like Cansever are another reason that good literary magazines like Five Points can be an intellectual workout in perfect binding. Cansever was a member of the Ikinci Yeni, "the second new" wave of Turkish poets. Not a fact that an average reader might know, but the kind of tidbit that raises the pulse rate of eager literary readers like me.

The fiction hallmark in this issue of Five Points could certainly be considered "April 1863," the excerpt from Madison Smartt Bell's novel "Devil's Dream" (Pantheon, 2009.) I find Bell's writing deliberate and over-weighted; From the rear or what had been their rear a cannon coughed up thunder and grapeshot. Henri was shocked to a slightly clearer sense of the occasion and its time and place. I'm a minority opinion. Bell, author of twelve novels and a National Book Award finalist, is a critical ‘get.'

Thomas Mallon, interviewed elsewhere in the issue, provides a more engrossing fiction contribution; pages from a novel in progress about the Watergate Scandal. The excerpt imagines Alice Roosevelt Longworth, in 1972 an elderly doyenne, as an acerbic and witty observer of Washington scene, including this section on Rose Kennedy's "lamentable" Lily Pulitzer dresses, [p]olka-dotted knee -length muumuus that could be shower curtains, for all anyone knew.